Making the day better?

There are some issues , that we need to resolve as a collective and as a contributing mass to make this project a success on a grander scale:

How do we engage (this word has been debated at length in the last two years, for example at the CASPAR events at UCL) with a wider public audience and break the silo?

How do we bring in funding to pay for publicity materials such as posters, stickers and mail shots? At the moment, the only costs are for running the server (covered under PAS running costs) and registering the domain name.

Do we need to recruit new team members to make this project easier to run?

How do we get established, big name academics and archaeologists to participate? We haven’t managed to garner contributions from people of the standing of Hodder or Renfrew, and we don’t seem to have had anything from the big name TV archaeologists even though we’ve badgered them on social media, for instance. Why have they not joined in? What is the barrier stopping these people from participating?

How do we get archaeologists from developing and even many developed countries to participate? We lack a volume of entries from say sub-Saharan Africa or Japan or China or South America. The map below shows where people have come from to view the site (blue shades getting heavier means the site was viewed in greater quantities there).

How do we retain people annually? Contributions have gone down from the first year of the project even though we now have over 1000 individuals registered. Why is this?

How do we get people with an interest, but no professional or amateur involvement in ‘archaeology’ as a discipline but maybe as a passion to contribute?

How do we reach out to media channels and get our project into their output?

How do we get institutional buy-in on the scale made by Museum of London or RCHAMS?

Can we make this a reproducible model for other disciplines? We built on the Day of Digital Humanities for instance.

What do we need to do better? Did you hear about the project at the last minute, or did you have problems registering or contributing your post? If you don’t tell us, we can’t improve.

Research potential

Some academic work has already been done on these data that have been generated via the project website. Since the 26th, Ben Marwick of the University of Washington has done some in-depth modelling using the R programming language and previously, Shawn Graham from CarletonUniversity did some topic modelling and has blogged extensively about what he did with the website content. The content added here, provides a wonderful career insight for aspiring archaeologists world-wide and can only get more useful year-on-year.

Visualisation of author groups screenshot from work by Ben Marwick.

Now, we as a collective have to write up three years of the project as an academic article and the raw content of these posts will be posted as CSV to github shortly.

See you next year?

The Day of Archaeology team 2013: Andrew, Daniel, Jaime, Lorna, Matt, Monty and Tom.

… is still going – but just some conclusions to go. I guess this highlights another verity of the archaeological life – sometimes the hours are a bit long! I’ve had a pretty enjoyable afternoon, though, delving into various discussion boards about Civilization and looking at some of the modifications (or ‘mods’) that players come up with for the game. All helpful for my argument that games are already a great way of engaging people in the past; they often have their problems, but many players devote a lot of time and energy to creatively adapting them, often to be more closely representative of different periods. Sometimes these modders are archaeologists too! (See http://www.dayofarchaeology.com/gaming-in-archaeology/, and Shawn Graham’s blog below).

So here are a couple of interesting things that people have done with Civilization and other computer strategy games:

Hello all! Today I’m writing an article – indeed hoping to finish writing it – about the entertaining world of computer games which deal with the past. This is for a book about digital engagement strategies for archaeology being edited by Chiara Bonacchi of the Institute of Archaeology. Archaeologists have written quite a bit about other forms of media portrayal of the past, but not so much about computer games (with a few notable exceptions including fellow DofA blogger Shawn Graham). They are such a big cultural phenomenon – and business – today though that they shouldn’t be ignored, especially as they are already engaging lots of people’s interest in the past.

I’m looking particularly at strategy games like Civilization. While we can criticise various aspects of the way such games model the past, I don’t want to dwell on that and instead aim to draw attention to the vibrant fan communities and ‘modding’ scene, with players actively contributing new content to a game’s development. Later on I’ll post some links to a couple of websites which demonstrate the breadth of engagement that’s already happening through this medium.